by Markus
10. December 2009 07:16
As some of you may know I am a bit of a technology geek and one thing that I have always liked is flashlights in different forms from small to large and from handheld to head lamps. Since geocaching has entered our lives the "need" for good flashlights has increased and after scouring the Swedish market for decent lights I found a couple of nice lights that were priced reasonably. One is a 3W headlamp from Jula that is actually pretty good for it's money (art. no. 957119 at 249:-) and of course the LedLenser H7 available at about double the money. The LedLenser is a really bright and very small lamp with just one drawback as I see it and that is that it is not regulated, this means that you have to be a bit careful when choosing batteries and that the light will be brighter when the batteries ar new and the fade as thay run out. The dimming effect does not happen on a regulated lamp as it keeps the current to the LED contant until i simply shuts off. As for handheld lamps the only high performance lamp I have had until recently is the Gerber LX3.0 which is a really nice lamp and the build quality is excellent. Yesterday however I received a couple of new handheld lamps from DealExtreme (http://www.dealextreme.com). The first one I unpacked was a really small (about the size of a pen) light that is called Tank007. Runs on two AAA batteries and is supposed to put out about 170Lumen, this little light really impressed me as it is really handy to take along and yet it is reasonably bright. The second one was a MTE SF-23 with a SSC P7 diode that runs on a single "18650" battery (a LiIon rechargeable battery at 3,7V). This light is amazingly bright and it spreads the light fairly good. I bought this particular lamp as I was looking for a lamp with lots of "spread". I was not after a "thrower" lamp but really something that you can use when geocaching at night. When geocaching I find it that you rarely have use for a lamp that throws a couple of hundred meters but rather something that is really bright up at around 50 or so. So far the light has really exceeded my expectations, how dissappointed can you really get with a light that has 900Lumens and cost around $30? I will try to get a couple of beamshots here later on so you can see how the light patterns differ between the lights.
below: TANK007 E06
Below: MTE SF-23 SSC P7-D-SXO
